FileFish

UCI-compliant chess engine written in pure Python

Current Status

• Bitboard representation
• Pseudo-legal move generation (magic bitboards)
• Incremental apply_move/undo_move
• Perft validated against canonical values
• Evaluation
• Search (negamax + alpha-beta)
• UCI protocol

Requirements

This project has no external dependencies beyond the standard library. However, the use of PyPy3 is strongly recommended, as it provides a significant performance boost over CPython.

Usage

git clone https://github.com/thercstk/filefish.git
cd filefish
pypy3 -m tests.perft

Keep in mind that the project is still in development, these are only raw move generation benchmarks.

Architecture

File	Role
constants.py	General-purpose constants
board.py	Board state, apply/undo
attack_tables.py	Precomputed attack tables
movegen.py	Pseudo-legal move generation

Inspiration

This engine was inspired by:

• The Chess Programming Wiki — where all the techniques used in this project can be found
• Stockfish — as a design guide, even though this project follows a different implementation path
• Sunfish and D-house — mostly used as a reference point for performance comparisons